


you must have wondered if i loved you back

by tuomniia



Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: F/F, Other, angsty and yearning, pining. so much of it, that's all this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-17 16:35:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29474829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuomniia/pseuds/tuomniia
Summary: i did, i did, i do
Relationships: Detective/Ava du Mortain, Female Detective/Ava du Mortain
Kudos: 5





	you must have wondered if i loved you back

Looking for meaning where there is none. 

It never happens more than when Cameron has feelings for someone. A glance, a phrase, a lingering touch. Does it mean something? Does she feel the same? Does she also sit in the silence between words, wondering if Cameron thinks of her? 

It’s infuriating. It’s exhausting. It’s hoping when they’re not even sure they should be hoping. They don’t want to push, they won’t be the one to bring it up. They’re content, mostly, they tell themselves. They’re content to wait. To stay here, to be whatever it is that this is. Whatever she wants. Or whatever she needs. 

They draw their breath, sucking it carefully through their teeth. 

When they were younger, they used to sit at their fathers feet as he did paperwork. Inside his home office, afternoon light filtering in through the window panes and catching the dust motes— highlighting their lazy dance. Rook sat tucked up to his massive oaken desk, wood grain turned liquid honey in the warm light. Cameron would sit with their back resting against his legs while they read books. Happy to steal the warmth from him. Tucked safely inside mystery novels, usually. They loved the thrill of solving the mystery before the main characters. Picking up on the clues, the foreshadowing. They loved knowing what was going to happen next. It made them feel smart and in control. 

Now, though, with this feeling. This feeling of long slumbering embers finally catching fire inside the tinder dry confines of their chest, they don’t know what’s going to happen next. They have no clues. No hints. No suggestive turn of a phrase to nudge forward the truth of what will come. Because life isn’t written with distinct plots in mind. There is no one singular plan or end game to achieve. Life just happens.

No. No, life is a tangle of computer wires under Rook’s familiar desk. Impossible to figure out until you’ve dissected them with your fingers, and laid them out one by one and traced them to their source. Even then, even when you’ve spent years untangling the past, there’s no way to untangle the future. 

Cameron can’t know where this feeling will lead. If she feels the same. If it warms them, or if it’ll burn. Will they be left in the third degree? Or will the chill be chased from their bones? Will it leave them irrevocably scarred and hanging on by a thread, or will it save their life and give them something to hold on to? Ashes or hearth, they can’t know.

But most of all, what haunts them the most— The suffocating smoke that chases the peace of sleep away as a dog chases a rabbit in the yard. The draft in the window that raises goosebumps on their skin.

Does she feel it too? 

They wonder if knowing that would make it easier, or if it would do just the opposite. If it would drive already splintered rib bone into their lungs— their heart. If the fear of it would constrict their throat, choke them until their lips turned blue. 

They’ve been hurt before. So badly ravaged that everything that they’d ever known of themselves had vanished as the floor had collapsed from under their feet. As an arrow— shot from the strong arm and a compound bow— tore through their chest and left scars that would still be there even when all that is left is bone. Bleached by the sun. Flesh long since eaten away by rot and scavengers. 

The heartbreak had forced the air from their lungs and replaced their blood with liquid mercury and lead. How they’d felt heavy for months. Months, and then for years. How the once light heart— if not a little bruised and beaten from the passing of Rook— had been turned to stone and how pieces of it still is. Beating with heavy clinks and scrapes. Functioning, but cracked, and sore, and heavy. 

It had almost killed them to be hurt like that. They’d dug themselves out of the ruins of their heartbreak and had to build themselves anew. It had been dirty, bloody, strenuous work. Their fingers are raw from it. 

To be put through that again… well. They’re not sure whether they’d make it out alive this time. 

_Tu omnia._ She is everything. 

Does she? Feel it too? Cameron would understand if this has all been inside their head. It’d been a long time since they’ve felt this way about anyone. It would be understandable if they’ve just been caught up in the excitement of it all. 

Cameron’s mind wanders, to the curve of her lips when she smiles. Just the tiniest whisper of something kept hidden from unwanted eyes. 

But that’s just it, isn’t it? Cameron is looking at it. At her smile, the one she doesn’t show to just anyone. 

So, what does it mean? 

Could they be more than this one day? More than two people who sneak glances at each other in secret moments? They hope so. Hope so desperately, it’s hard to remember that it’s inside their head. Wishful thinking. But, is it? It is. Or maybe it’s not. They wouldn’t know if they didn’t ask. 

But Cameron is not going to ask. 

To ask would be to pressure, and they don’t want to do that. They want to be whatever she wants them to be. While at the same time craving more. 

They sigh. Imagines tracing their fingers over the perfect skin of her knuckle. Revering in the softness of the skin, and the rise and fall created by tendon and bone. Small foothills in the landscape of her. How it must feel to be held by them. 

Inside their chest, their heart twists, and they feel as more stone crumbles away with the movement. Slowly coming back to life. 

If she doesn’t feel the same, they hope that she at least sticks around a while longer. Cameron doesn’t think their heart is ready to part with the green of her eyes just yet.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @ tuomniia


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